Janet Paisley, a prolific and versatile Scottish writer whose husband’s fits of violence toward her and their sons, one of whom was gay, informed her novels, plays and poetry, died on Nov. 9 in Denny, Scotland. She was 70.

The cause was lung cancer, her son David Paisley said.

Ms. Paisley wrote in multiple genres and formats — poetry, short stories, historical fiction and nonfiction, television scripts and dramas for theater and radio.

Her best-known works include “White Rose Rebel” (2008), a historical romance set during the Jacobite rising of 1745; “Not for Glory” (2001), a collection of interwoven short stories; “The Lasses, O” (2010), a play in which five women remember the poet Robert Burns; and the poetry collections “Reading the Bones” (1999) and “Sang fur the Wandert” (2015).

Ms. Paisley’s work, though not well known in the United States, was translated into more than a dozen languages and widely anthologized at home and throughout Europe. She wrote in English and in Scots, the Scottish language, which she championed. “It’s the language Scots invented to talk about their selves,” she once said.

Among her most significant works was her first play, “Refuge” (1996), for which she won the prestigious Peggy Ramsay Award and £50,000 for the year’s best new play. It is set in a shelter for battered women, where several characters reflect on their experience with domestic violence — a subject Ms. Paisley knew all too well.

It was not until 2000 that she revealed the details. The moment she chose was in the midst of a vituperative battle in Scotland over whether to keep legislation that barred schools from discussing homosexuality. Homophobic billboards had been posted all over the country in a well-financed campaign to keep the legislation in place.

“I write because I can’t be silent any longer about the continuing public abuse of many of our children,” Ms. Paisley wrote in an open letter to the newspaper The Scotsman. She went on to say that her son David was gay and that her husband had beaten him viciously because of it.

When David was 3, she wrote, he “ballet-danced into the living room dressed in vest, pants and rubber swimming-ring tutu.” Her husband, she said, beat him, insisting that he would not “bring up a poof.”

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Ms. Paisley’s “White Rose Rebel” (2008) is a historical romance set during the Jacobite rising of 1745.CreditOverlook/Rookery

“My son continued to be regularly beaten to knock ‘it’ out of him,” she added.

“His four elder brothers, brutalized for other reasons, were ordered to refer to him as ‘the poof’ and not to speak or play with him in case it infected them,” she wrote. “His baby brother, too small to be instructed, was regularly beaten too, but just for being alive.”

To see his family life exposed like this was traumatic and harrowing, David Paisley said in an email. Still, he said, his mother was telling the truth in his defense. He recalled going out at night with his brothers to throw water balloons and paint at the homophobic billboards. “Mum was our getaway driver,” he said. (The Scottish Parliament eventually repealed the legislation, and Scotland is now widely perceived as gay friendly.)

Ms. Paisley turned to writing in her late 30s, after losing one son in infancy and experiencing her own brush with death during the birth of another. She started with stories and poems. But she had to write clandestinely, she said, because her husband, Bill Paisley, did not approve. At one point he smashed her typewriter.

He was also violent toward her, though she rarely discussed this publicly.

“Janet was beaten regularly in horrific and devastating ways,” Linda Jackson, a close friend who compiled the book “Janet Paisley: Growing and Dying” (2018), said in an email. “Her in-laws knew and asked her once what she had said to anger him. This after she arrived at their door, battered and with clumps of her hair pulled out.”

Ms. Paisley did much of her writing “in my head” while she changed diapers and made the beds, she told the Scottish newspaper The Herald in 1996.

“I had to write when he was not around,” she said of her husband. “I did my pen corrections in the evenings while I was pretending to read the newspaper.”

At one point she came across “If,” Rudyard Kipling’s inspirational paean to British stoicism, and was stunned into recognition — and action. She pored over the poem for hours, finally deciding that “as soon as it was safe to try and do so, I had to leave with the children and never come back.”

Leave she did, in 1985, divorcing her husband after 16 years of marriage. She raised her six remaining sons on her own, struggling to eke out a living as a writer while managing a house full of boys.

Her work blossomed as she drew on her life experience. She became a lecturer in writing at Glasgow University, taught creative writing in Scots and tutored with a group called Survivor’s Poetry. She also raised money for women’s shelters.

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Among Ms. Paisley’s best-known works was this collection of interwoven short stories, published in 2001. Her work blossomed as she drew on her life experience.CreditCanongate Books

“She was extraordinarily sensitive to abuse and exploitation in society, whether by men of women in the structures of the patriarchy or by any authorities of any potentially vulnerable people,” Alan Riach, a poet and professor of Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow, said in an email.

Despite its often dark origins, Ms. Paisley infused her writing with humor. She also liked performing, inhabiting her characters during readings at literary festivals throughout Europe.

Mr. Riach said she “had a keen sense of how writing should engage, be entertaining, give pleasure, generate tension and deliver rewards and satisfactions.”

Janet Violet McNaught was born on Jan. 12, 1948, in Ilford, Essex, England. Her mother, Harriet McNaught, a nurse and seamstress, left her womanizing husband and raised Janet and her two sisters, Joan and Sheila, in Avonbridge, a village in central Scotland, where they lived with Harriet’s father.

Ms. Paisley grew up in a house full of books and loved reading and storytelling. “One of the bad-mannered things we were allowed to do was to read at table,” she told The Herald. “Everybody had a book in front of them.”

She recalled her teenage years in the 1960s as joyous and exuberant. But one day, before she started classes at Callendar Park College of Education, she was raped. After Ms. Paisley died, the BBC program “The Last Word” aired a segment on her in which she discussed the incident, saying that her life “nose-dived” afterward.

She graduated in 1969 and married shortly after, at 21.

Ms. Paisley often said that her seven sons were her greatest source of happiness, and that losing one of them, Christopher, the day after he was born was torture. In her poem “Mayday,” she wrote of the experience:

All you left, breast full, blood heat, the bluish milk,

fell in the void of your leaving

and destitute, my arms raged.

In addition to her son David, she is survived by her five other sons, Michael, Jonathan, Mark, Laurence and Matthew, as well as four grandchildren. Her former husband died this year.

It was while giving birth to David in 1979 — when she almost hemorrhaged to death — that Ms. Paisley had an awakening. She decided to start writing, realizing her time could be short.

“I felt there was no point in waiting any longer to begin,” she said, “because it would be many a long year before I would have a room of my own.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Janet Paisley, Scottish Writer Who Drew on Abuse at Home, Dies at 70. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe